The Clark Art Institute is wonderful. It’s always worth a visit. They have an exhibit of Abelardo Morrell’s work up through February 17. Watch the video below for an introduction to his work. I first saw his work ca. 2002. He was working in camera obscura then too but in black and white. I really liked what he was doing then and this looks amazing.
Category Archives: Arts
Reading Material: “Re-sourcing the Mind”
I first heard Michael Sacasas on a podcast several years ago. I was very taken with his observations on how technology can work as a “convivial tool” or against conviviality. Yesterday he posted an essay on the “labor of articulation”, Re-sourcing the mind. I’d never heard the term before and it is spot on. Articulating your thoughts is hard work! Here’s an excerpt:
Consider what is entailed in the labor of articulation… It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.9 To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in relationship with others.
I agree. I also think there’s much truth to this:
My contention… is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.
Read the whole piece here. It’s very good.
R.I.P. Steve Albini
It’s hard for me to articulate, but there’s a friend of mine, Peter Sotos, who’s written extensively about abuse and murder and things of that nature. A lot of his writing is extremely difficult to read. It’s repellent. You’re brought into the mind of a sadist, pretty convincingly. And I feel like that experience, reading that stuff, is shocking to your core in the way that the horrors of the reality of those things should be.
That was Big Black’s draw for me. Albini didn’t just sing about darkness and evil. As an artist, he threw himself into it. He articulated something that’s very hard to articulate. Their music captured what he describes in the paragraph above. He wrote unapologetically from the standpoint of a perpetrator who has utter contempt for his victims. I hadn’t heard anything similar before and anything similar since. There was a long time, 10-15 years, where I couldn’t listen to them. I listen some now but it’s still much harder to do so than when I was young.
Continue reading
Poem for Labor Day
I first him read this on the PBS News Hour on Labor Day probably twenty-five years ago. I’ve thought of it every Labor Day since.
Thought for the Day – December 18, 2021
Betty Hall, founder of Simon’s Rock, on education:
“There is a four-year span here when youth should become acquainted with the whole range of human inquiry – man in relation to his physical environment – man in relation to his fellow man or social environment – and man in relation to the world of his own creation, his music, his art, religion, literature, and philosophy.”
Thought for the Day – June 27, 2021
Writers are like anyone else: inspired by conversation with some people much more than others. Everyone speaks happily, wittily, jokes and laughs with someone, but it may not be with you.
-Joyce Carol Oates
Thought for the Day – January 1, 2021
“We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.”
-Ralph Ellison
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Answer
The Answer
Then what is the answer? Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilisations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history … for contemplation or in fact …
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
Robinson Jeffers, 1935
Uncivilisation – III
From The Dark Mountain Project’s Manifesto:
III
UNCIVILISATION
Without mystery, without curiosity and without the form imposed by a partial answer, there can be no stories—only confessions, communiqués, memories and fragments of autobiographical fantasy which for the moment pass as novels.
– John Berger, ‘A Story for Aesop’, from Keeping a Rendezvous
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves — above all, by the story of civilisation.
This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.
What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment’s legacy — a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world.